ARTS Pick: Stan Winston Festival of the Moving Creature

Chances are, your favorite creature feature stars the work of makeup and special effects master, and UVA alumnus, Stan Winston. The eponymous Stan Winston Arts Festival of the Moving Creature at UVA is the culmination of a yearlong workshop in which students bring their creative and engineering skills to life with help from visiting artists from The Stan Winston School of Character Arts in Los Angeles, founded by Winston’s son, Matt, in honor of his father’s lifetime dedication to all things creeping, crawling, and spectacular to look at. Info at www.virginia.edu/arts/visual_arts/events/moving_creature.

Over the past decade, swamp-funk outfit JJ Grey & Mofro has built a solid following and a reputation for intense, intimate performances. The Florida-based band incorporates soul and jazz into tight, guitar-driven original grooves, backed by bluesy basslines and bold brass. Though the

Perhaps Israel wasn’t the best environment for Yonatan Gat to grow as a musician. “The thing about Israel is, it’s very small and very isolated,” said Gat, who now lives in Brooklyn. “Personally, I found the kind of music that I am excited about is not a really good fit for Israel. It’s a very

If you’ve never heard of Jordan Rock, who’ll take the stage at Piedmont Virginia Community College on February 28, you can be forgiven. He’s never played Charlottesville, and his Web presence isn’t exactly on the level of an “Ultimate Split.” Come to think of it, his Web presence isn’t really

Author Edwidge Danticat weaves stories of strong women overcoming hardship and forging new identities in unfamiliar places. Born in Haiti, Danticat moved to Brooklyn when she was 12 years old, and the experience of transporting from one culture to another has since informed her writing, which

Why is popularity always the reward for quirky high schoolers in movies where the whole plot is about learning to be happy without it? You don’t celebrate your twelfth step with a shot, you don’t get a mansion after reaching nirvana, but somehow our teenage morality scripts are still peddling

Watch the documentary I’m Not Racist… Am I? and you can’t help but ask yourself the same question. The story unfolds around 12 students of varying backgrounds who complete a year-long program of workshops and discussions about race and privilege. As they grapple with these issues, the students

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Mid-month is usually a pretty quiet time in a local art gallery. First Fridays crowds have long since returned home and the promise of free wine and cheese is a faint memory. But the downtown Charlottesville gallery scene isn’t dead between opening and closing receptions. Many would argue that

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Confession: I’ve never read a comic book. Sure, I housed volumes of Calvin & Hobbes as a child, but I always took the snooty literary view of comics. They were fine for teenage boys and any woman inexplicably drawn to gratuitous violence and triple-D boobs, but I reserved my highbrow tastes

I don’t know who or what director Sam Taylor-Johnson sacrificed to the god of false bondage, but it worked: Fifty Shades of Grey is the best film it could have possibly been given the circumstances. This is quite a different thing from saying it’s good. It’s not. At its core, this adaptation of

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Celebrate Fat Tuesday in style by tapping into those Southern roots. The Jazz Rascals warm up the evening with a set of Dixieland jazz. The nine-piece ragtime group performs traditional numbers by such greats as Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington. Jolie Fille takes the late

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Every Wachowski movie, for better or worse, is a passion project. There is no theme, visual detail, character or line of dialogue to which the sibling duo does not have a deep personal attachment, from the hopeful nihilism of The Matrix to Cloud Atlas’ meditation on reincarnation and the risk

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